Paul Feig is a talentless hack who seized on a shallow Tumblr feminism to crawl out of director’s jail. His “women can be X, too” ethos isn’t new, it isn’t interesting and as one known example, Melissa McCarthy isn’t doing anything Roseanne Barr didn’t do better twenty years ago.

Feigism doesn’t make women strong, it doesn’t make women interesting. You wanna see a movie about strong women Getting Over on The Man, go see 9 to 5. You want strong genre women? Agent fucking Scully. You want strong real world women? Check out anything on TV with Juliana Margulies (I prefer ER to The Good Wife, courtrooms bore me).

Talented people making good things who don’t need an collegiate ideology department “narrative” to boost the signal. That’s how you make a point.

Football is an allegory for what made America great. Not the freedom and democracy pap high school tried to feed us, but territorial aggrandizement, free use of organized violence and submission to proper authority. It’s what conquered our land and what protected the West from the Soviets (mostly alone), the Nazis (although we needed help) and the Kaiser (since the Entente Cordiale couldn’t finish the job).

This piece of crap about to begin is unfortunately an allegory for what America has become. Lackeys of the wealthy cheating to add to the gold piles of billionaires. An ignorant citizenry rife with partisans making excuses for their arbitrarily chosen side. Contrarian heckling from the peanut gallery over semantics and minutiae.

It’s gone from Patton and Bradley to Enron and Iran-Contra. Senior executives look the other so they can unconvincingly plead ignorance about the corruption conducted on their behalf.

Yesterday while driving to watch the Blazer game I ended up behind a Franz Bread triple trailer. When we got to the bakery it had to make a laborious right turn. As a person considerate to strangers and a friend of several truckers I know to hang way the fuck back and to make sure I’m not in the driver’s blind spot.

So did the bicycle rider in the bike lane next to me!!!

She had stopped right about at my passenger window and I was so pleased to see a pedaler who’s not an asshole it took a lot of willpower to not run around the car to high five her. Like I said in the title, weird, and probably condescending.

I’ve been watching all the Blazer games at my boys’ bar The High Dive. Getting ready for my day I grab a shirt to change into from my work uniform and I realize I’ve worn that same plaid shirt to a few of the games. So I grab, my other plaid shirt instead.

My wardrobe is hella small. I sweat too much for cotton but wicky tees are all solid colors and I do NOT have the body for that. Get with it, funny printed t-shirt makers! I’m looking at you, Woot.com!!!

(use that link if the embed doesn’t work, WordPress seems to be doing something weird with embeds)

Some juicy bits:

Law has to be simple enough so that people can internalize it in their daily choices. If they can’t internalize it, they won’t trust it. And how do you make it simple? Because life is complex, and here is the hardest and biggest change: We have to restore the authority to judges and officials to interpret and apply the law.

and

As you’re going down, and walking down the sidewalk during the day, you have to think that if there is a dispute, there’s somebody in society who sees it as their job to affirmatively protect you if you’re acting reasonably. That person doesn’t exist today.

And to reassure my politically correct/progressive fans that this guy’s not some tool (and believe me, I was waiting to hear “tort reform” presented as a solution, it’s not)

… because we got into this legal quicksand because we woke up in the 1960s to all these really bad values: racism, gender discrimination, pollution — they were bad values. And we wanted to create a legal system where no one could have bad values anymore. The problem is, we created a system where we eliminated the right to have good values.

Damn. Can I get an amen? Hopefully this guy doesn’t turn out to be some sheep humper.

Systems don’t achieve anything. People do. If you built a system that requires “love ninjas” instead of “paycheck cashers” that system is doomed to fail. And schools are failing. There are bright spots where good souls doing hard work achieve greatness but these do little more than show off how bad it is everywhere else.

We’ve got to stop looking at teachers like miracle workers and start building them a support structure that realizes a lot of them are not divinely inspired to illuminate eager minds. They’re doing a job, just a job. A critical job of unparalleled sensitivity, but a job nonetheless. They’re not superheroes. Let’s stop expecting them to be.

Frustrated when former Commissioner Randy Leonard shut down his adult bookstore on Fourth Avenue, Wright invited the homeless — in October 2011 — to squat indefinitely on the lot.

I like a dirty Old Town. Bums, junkies and dealers are in every respect superior to snotty yuppies and the mooks and hootchies, douchebags and woo girls who are trying to turn the area into whatever the fuck an “entertainment district” is.

I know that makes it a rough place to live and work. I’ve never worked in Old Town but I’ve lived nearby and I’ve spent a lot of time in those bars, where several times duty called to back up a bartender.

At any rate, NW Third never felt dangerous compared to SE 99th & Harold until Dirty opened up.

Sometime on the night of Christmas Eve or early Christmas morning, my sister died.

Eulogies are supposed to be about the deceased, but I think they’re always about us. I’ll try to talk about my sister.

She was born December 17th, 1976. She refused to have more than a finger length’s of her hair cut off because she’d promised our paternal grandfather she wouldn’t. She showed the door to a boyfriend who demanded she have dinner on the table by the time he got home from work. She inherited (or learned) the quick, cold temper that my mother, her sister, their mother and I imagine her mother all had. She was one quarter Canadian (naturalized). Our parents called her Toad. I have no idea why.

She liked frogs, though. Her cell phone made some kind of jungle frog chirp when it rang. It made gift giving easy, frog = success. She didn’t get hangovers, but one day she called me to ask about my previously mentioning I was starting to get mild headaches after a night of drinking. Getting old sucks.

My dad was supposed to pick her up for presents at our stepsister’s house. She (sister, not stepsister) had a seizure about four months ago and thus couldn’t drive. He called me when she didn’t answer the door to see if I had a key. I didn’t, and neither did my mother, who he’d already called. Mom called some time later to say Dad called 911 and the police were going to break in. It “didn’t look good.”

He didn’t go into her apartment. The police told him he shouldn’t, but they said she looked like she was just sleeping. People always say that and maybe sometimes it’s true. The one freshly dead body I’ve ever seen sure looked dead.

We were in a friend’s borrowed car, the GF was driving and she went all Dukes of Hazzard to get to my mom’s house. Except the jumps, we didn’t jump anything. Upon arrival I asked her to stay in the car for a few minutes while I went inside. Mom knew. Of course she knew. She, wailed is the only word for it, while I held her upright. The GF said she could hear it from the street and came in before the “few minutes” were up. She’s better at people than I am.

Mom went outside for some fresh air and I had to call her sister, my aunt. I went with Mom to tell the neighbors, who fortunately can be relied upon to keep tabs on her. Aunt arrived with some well-meaning platitudes. Our fortuitous possession of a friend’s car was taken for divine intervention. Mom’s getting fatalistic in her old age to think God sent a couple from University Park to Utah to make killing my sister more convenient for the family. Me, I think we’re a giant TV and God’s munching popcorn and laughing. I knew it wasn’t the time to mention that.

Mom didn’t want to go to my sister’s apartment (I try to stay out of Vancouver myself) and Dad left before the body was removed. It was taken to the closest funeral home the Vancouver police had on their list. When we can arrange it we’ll take her ashes to a little town in northeast Oregon called Athena. I remembered at some point she always wanted to be buried there.

Can I talk about me now? Thanks.

I’m okay. Okay doesn’t mean great. I get waves of sadness but they pass quickly. Kid Me resented her for being the favorite. I didn’t realize that at the time, I just thought my parents should have quit while they were ahead with just me. As I got older I equally subconciously realized it wasn’t her fault. I can’t say I liked my sister. Like every other person I share DNA with I probably wouldn’t have associated with her voluntarily. She was okay, though. I kinda wish I’d gotten drunk with her at least once, but that was always unlikely and the feeling will probably pass.

Will it hit me? Maybe. Maybe this is the benefit to being a realist (I won’t be offended if you spell that “pessimist”). My dad broke down a little when he told me she’d died, but I had no immediate physical reaction. Once I accepted the GF was going to speed all the way from Jantzen Beach to Lents to tell Mom my mind was in neutral. Defense mechanism? Clock cycle conservation? I don’t know. I’ve been thinking it, I’ve even said it out loud a few times.

My sister is dead.
I don’t have a sister any more.
I’m an only child now.
My sister is dead.

It hasn’t hit me yet.

Tomorrow we’ll make arrangements. Decisions about last paychecks and cremations and property and hopefully I can get into her apartment before my parents find anything embarrassing in there. Maybe I’ll go to pieces when I see the bed she died in. I doubt it, but it’s possible.

She was 37. She smoked menthols. She chewed with her mouth open. She’ll never go to Scotland, but maybe in July when Athena has its Caledonian Games the bagpipes and the yips of the sheepdog trials will carry to the old cemetary in the brown hills where our grandparents are also buried.